rified and perfected, and
rashness rendered innocuous, and error exposed, by the collision of
mind with mind, and knowledge with knowledge. It is the place where
the professor becomes eloquent, and is a missionary and a preacher,
displaying his science in its most complete and most winning form,
pouring it forth with the zeal of enthusiasm, and lighting up his own
love of it in the breasts of his hearers. It is the place where the
catechist makes good his ground as he goes, treading in the truth day
by day into the ready memory, and wedging and tightening it into the
expanding reason. It is a place which wins the admiration of the young
by its celebrity, kindles the affections of the middle-aged by its
beauty, and rivets the fidelity of the old by its associations. It is
a seat of wisdom, a light of the world, a minister of the faith, an
Alma Mater of the rising generation. It is this and a great deal more,
and demands a somewhat better head and hand than mine to describe it
well.

Such is a University in its idea and in its purpose; such in good
measure has it before now been in fact. Shall it ever be again? We
are going forward in the strength of the Cross, under the patronage of
the Blessed Virgin, in the name of St. Patrick, to attempt it.

II. SITE OF A UNIVERSITY

If we would know what a University is, considered in its elementary
idea, we must betake ourselves to the first and most celebrated home of
European literature and source of European civilization, to the bright
and beautiful Athens,--Athens, whose schools drew to her bosom, and
then sent back again to the business of life, the youth of the Western
World for a long thousand years. Seated on the verge of the continent,
the city seemed hardly suited for the duties of a central metropolis of
knowledge; yet, what it lost in convenience of approach, it gained in
its neighbourhood to the traditions of the mysterious East, and in the
loveliness of the region in which it lay. Hither, then, as to a sort
of ideal land, where all archetypes of the great and the fair were
found in substantial being, and all departments of truth explored, and
all diversities of intellectual power exhibited, where taste and
philosophy were majestically enthroned as in a royal court, where there
was no sovereignty but that of mind, and no nobility but that of
genius, where professors were rulers, and princes did homage, hither
flocked continually from the very corners